I remember biking through lower Manhattan after sunset a couple days after the brunt of Hurricane Sandy passed. I needed to leave my apartment and I needed to see for myself what my Manhattanite friends had seen: a pitch-black city, ravaged by some apocalypse, filled with citizens terrified of looters, and a few hubs of food trucks and folks selling flashlights. This was a moment where people who had never needed help before in their lives suddenly found themselves adrift. As John H. Richardson writes of the devastation that hit Breezy Point...

...Everybody responds differently to having their life destroyed. For some people, a disaster exposes fault lines that have been there, deep fissures that tell them nothing can or should ever be the same. Others want to reclaim the lost ground and re-create life just as it was, without delay.

The wonderful thing about this "Anchor Me Here" video, directed by Laura Egan, is that you can tell the people in it belong overwhelmingly in the second category. Impressionistic more than anything, it captures the emotions everyone who was affected felt: loss, melancholy, uncertainty. But then the banjo kicks in, and you see familiar, gorgeous shots of children laughing, women singing gospel music, workers shaping wood and painting houses, old men jumping back into the ocean in swimsuits and on boats, and you remember we got through it the same way we always do.